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Enrollment now open at the EPFL Extension School

The EPFL Extension School offers online courses with no prerequisites, enabling participants to obtain a Certificate of Open Studies from EPFL. Enrollment for the first program opened today.

Starting on Wednesday, 15 November, the EPFL Extension School is offering people with no prior university degree the chance to get an EPFL qualification. The school's first continuing education course, Applied Data Science – Machine Learning, is now open for enrollment. Students who successfully complete the course will get a Certificate of Open Studies (COS), a new type of academic qualification for the moment offered only by EPFL.

The EPFL Extension School is particularly well suited to professionals looking to study in an innovative field without having to give up their day job. It offers courses on concrete topics that are directly linked to the job market. "The only way to be ready for the digital transformation is to be part of it, which requires practical digital skills,” says professor Marcel Salathé, the school’s academic director. “The EPFL Extension School is our response to that challenge - online, flexible, affordable, and cutting-edge."

In-demand skills

And the EPFL Extension School allows learners to acquire these skills without having to sacrifice professional or family obligations. "A large number of participants have a job, a family or other commitments – they can't make it to a classroom,” explains professor Salathé. “That's why we've created an online school. We teach highly sought-after skills in a way that makes the learning process as flexible as possible.”

The EPFL Extension School aims to give anyone interested the chance to learn more about new technologies, given that digitization now affects almost every profession. Courses are offered at several levels, and the monthly tuition fee ranges from 300 to 490 Swiss francs depending on the course. "Each participant is supervised and gets individual time with a tutor via video link every week," explains Laura Downhower, executive director of the EPFL Extension School.

Thanks to the school’s partnerships with Infomaniak and GitHub, each participant will be given an email address from the Extension School, be able to register and use a domain name of their choosing, be provided with a free web hosting account as well as private repositories on the school's GitHub account. To obtain a Certificate of Open Studies, participants will have to pass all course assignments and projects, as well as an end-of-course project. Although participants who complete an EPFL continuing education course do not automatically gain entry into an EPFL degree program, the ECTS credits obtained are recognized by several European universities.